Steve Jobs Opera Premieres This Weekend

Steve Jobs conquered the computer and music worlds, but how will he fare among opera goers?

Patrons of the Santa Fe opera company will be the first to find out this Saturday when The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs, a libretto revolving around the personal and professional lives of the Apple founder premiers. And tickets are going fast; as of Thursday morning, just 20 tickets remained for the debut performance. Other stagings of the opera have more availability, but are about 80% sold out at present.

In development since 2015, the opera, which runs for six performances, focuses on Jobs as he looks back on the formative events of his life as he faces his own mortality.

Kicking off in the garage of the Jobs family home, with his father Paul Jobs giving him a workbench for his 10th birthday, the story then fast forwards to 2007 and the introduction of the iPhone. Jobs’ wife Laurene comes to his Cuppertino office after the introduction, chides him for not taking better care of himself, then asks him to come home and spend time with the family. Jobs agrees, but says he first needs to take a walk first to clear his head.

On that walk, he encounters the ghost of Chino Otogawa, his former spiritual mentor in Soto Zen Buddhism—and that begins a series of flashbacks and flash forwards to events in his life, including him witnessing his own memorial service (where he grumbles about some of the production elements).

The opera will be supported not only by a live orchestra, but with effects from old Mac computers as well.